The Twitter Files: Twitter And The FBI ‘Belly Button’
Posted by M. C. on January 4, 2023
“They also received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn’t like to be banned,” Taibbi wrote. “Here, the office for Democrat and House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff asks Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry.”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-twitter-files-twitter-and-the-fbi-belly-button
Journalist Matt Taibbi released the twelfth installment of “The Twitter Files” Tuesday afternoon that documented the relationship between government agencies and the social media platform.
The latest batch of files came roughly an hour after Taibbi released the eleventh installment of “The Twitter Files” which detailed what led up to the Intelligence Community cozying up with Twitter.
“By 2020, Twitter was struggling with the problem of public and private agencies bypassing them and going straight to the media with lists of suspect accounts,” Taibbi wrote. “In February, 2020, as COVID broke out, the Global Engagement Center — a fledgling analytic/intelligence arms of the State Department — went to the media with a report called, ‘Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns.’”
“The GEC flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA,’” Taibbi wrote. “State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. ZeroHedge, claiming the episode ‘led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.’ [Zero Hedge] had done reports speculating that the virus had lab origin.”
Taibbi showed examples of how the GEC’s report led to more explosive headlines that helped shape the narrative around the origins of the pandemic during its early days.
Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth even complained that media trying to find ways to tie pandemic mis/disinformation back to Russia was “revelatory of their motivations.”
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